Chanthaboune and I are in the final stages of our writing contest entry. We have noticed a couple of little problems. For one thing, we haven’t given any hint of our characters’ ethnicity (except the blonde, I suppose) and, as Chathaboune points out, everyone will assume they are all white.
Chanthaboune isn’t white, so she is not being swayed by her own ethnicity, though she may be making assumptions about the readers. Do you assume that characters in books match your own ethnic background if nothing else is specified? Do you care?
There is one series of mystery novels which has a white protagonist, but for some reason she just sounds African-American to me. She is blonde, which is how I know she is supposed to be white, but reading her as white required continual mental readjustment for me, so I gave it up and simply mentally recast her as black. The author will never know.
For another thing, the 800-word summary of the rest of the book is 2500 words long.
Once we deal with these two little things, we will be set.
The Sew? I Knit sewalong has extended the bag project for another couple of weeks. This is good news for me because there is this other bag I have had an idea for, but — being a slavish rule-follower — I had decided not to make it, in order to be ready to jump right in on the next sewalong.
It started with this bag, which a friend owns. Hers is in a wonderful 
crimson tapestry fabric. It is clearly handmade, but also very practical, with pockets and things, and sturdy — neither of which is always true of the average handmade tote bag.
Unlike my friend, I do not 
have a budget that will accommodate $200+ custom purses, so I am not considering buying one. But I did admire it online, along with this one from the same designer.
It is the shape, and the pleats, that I most like in these particular bags.
One of the sewalongers hooked us up with this tutorial for a pleated bag. It is a tote bag, not what I want, but the shape of the pattern was a surprise and an education.
That led me to this tutorial for a pleated clutch. Getting closer. Hotpatterns has a pattern for something very similar.
With all these resources and a ten-day extension, I may be able to make a bag of this type for myself.
While sewing the shopping carts at work, I toyed with pleated pockets, as well as gusseted and flat ones. In the end, the free-hanging pocket turned out to be the best choice (you will be glad to know this if you ever sew a shopping cart), so I took the pleated practice piece and sewed it up into a little makeup bag or something. It looks like a skirt, maybe.
The boys thought it would make a good hat for Nadia the cat.
It does make her look a bit like an Eastern potentate, doesn’t it?
In any case, this shows that you can get something like the desired shape with a square and straight pleats, but more geometry will be required to achieve anything close to the look of the originals.
I bought a gorgeous upholstery remnant for $1.60, and also have some more canvas scraps, not to mention tissue paper, so I will be playing around with various possibilities.
If any of you has the kind of visual/spatial intelligence that allows you to look at the bags above and say “Why, of course, she needs a quatrefoil and a trapezoid!”, then please let me know.
As for the little prototype bag, it’s pretty cute. I’ve used one of my son’s handmade hemp bracelets and a toggle bead for the closure. It is big enough to hold a glasses case, but small enough to throw into a purse.
I’ll probably use it.
Nice hat! I mean, bag! It is a fun shape. You are so inventive.
I am determined to make myself a carpet bag. Whether it will be knit or sewn, I know not. And it will not be before the bagalong is over. I’m thinking for fall.
However, if you are like other glasses wearers that I know, you never take off your glasses. Therefore a glasses case is hardly a necessity in your bag.
I never take off my glasses, but that’s because Dr. T says that when I do not have glasses on I can’t do anything that’s more than eight inches from my face. And 1) having anything eight inches from your face is awkward and 2) not everything in which I am interested should ever be that close to my face.
Ursula K. Le Guin — and almost all of her fans — were really distressed when the film version of the Earthsea trilogy came out and all the characters were white. She had been very careful to specify in the books that they were people of color.
I like it as a purse and it does make a fetching cat hat.
In the short story Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (upon which the film was based) the character played by Morgan Freeman is Irish, and lily-white.
Actually yeah – grades alone were always a huge motivation for me – but I know I’m in the minority here. I just always was very intent on getting perfect grades, and always very upset when I only wound up with a B. Which of course is part of the reason why my bad GRE score bugs me, but the darn things cost $115 bucks a pop – I can’t part with the cash right now to take it again. Now that I think about it, I probably would have done better if I wasn’t so distraught about the other stuff going on in my life – but oh well. I’ll either just live with it or save up the money and try to take it again somewhere down the line.
On a different topic: When I was taking Children’s Literature, I read a book called The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963. Now, this book is about a black family. However, the book makes very very few references to the fact that the family was black (I think the point was to get white kids to realize that black people are just PEOPLE), and many students (there were absolutely no “people of color” in the class) said that if they hadn’t seen the pictures on the cover, they never would have known that the family was supposed to be black until the end of the book. I guess that means that white kids were more likely to just assume that if race isn’t mentioned, the characters must be white. I wonder if black people or asians assume that too, or if the race isn’t mentioned, do they imagine characters “of color”? Black Sherlock Holmes? Asian Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights?